coming over from the west. The Gandangara joined forces with the Thurrawal/Darawal, who had linked up with remnants of the Dharug, in order to participate in the frontier war, also raiding cornfields. The decline in Dharug population had opened up parts of their territory to use by neighbouring tribal groups, which also fought among themselves. Aside from considerations of defending their territories against the European colonial expansion, a period of severe drought may have influenced this turn in strategy. Gandangara raiding bands, harvesting crops on settlers' properties, also attacked the Thurrawal and Dharug, so that the latter two began to collaborate against them, by helping the British authorities, and seeking refuge in squatters' settlements. Like other tribes, the Gandangara had developed strategies to cope with the superior firepower of musketry, teasing troops to fire at them, in the knowledge that, once fired, some time was required to reload them, during which the aborigines could launch spearing attacks. In 1816, 7 settlers, 4 on the Nepean and 3 at Macquarie's wife's property at Camden, were killed as the Gandangara came out of the hill lands in search of food. Macquarie ordered the 46th Regiment under Captain James Wallis to round up all Aborigines from the Hawkesbury down to these southern areas. These punitive expeditions aimed to strike terror into anyone surviving them. Wallis often found settlers unwilling to hand over the Darawal people who lived on their stations, but eventually, executing what he later recalled was a "melancholy but necessary duty", tracked down a group camping under the Cataract River near Appin. According to the local historian Anne-Maree Whitaker, what followed on 17 April 1816 was a massacre. Hearing a child's cry and a barking dog in the bush, Wallis lined up his soldiers to search for the fugitives. In the moonlight they could see figures jumping across the rocky landscape. Some of the Aborigines were shot and others were driven off the cliffs into a steep gorge. At least fourteen were killed and the only survivors were two women and three children. Among those killed was a mountain chief Conibigal, an old man called Balyin, a Dharawal man called Dunell, along with several women and children. Aboriginal descendants claim the figure of 14 is an underestimate, and that many more were slaughtered. The bodies of Conibigal and Dunell, after being decapitated, were hung from trees near Broughton's property, as a